It is known that the sources of bad and unpleasant odors include ammonia, trimethylamine, aldehydes, hydrogen sulfide, methyl mercaptan, dimethyl sulfide, fatty acid oxide and mixed gas, with generating alkaline, neutral or acidic smell. As one of the conventional processes of deodorizing bad odors, there may be mentioned a masking method by fragrant materials. According to the nature of bad odors, however, this method has a drawback that bad odors may sometimes be promoted by the fragrant materials employed. As an alternative to the masking method, there may be mentioned a neutralization-deodorization method in which alkaline smell- and acidic smell-generating substances are neutralized by acidic and alkaline materials, respectively, to make them odorless, but this method also has disadvantages that a two-stage operation is required in most cases admitting that it is effective for deodorization of acidic and alkaline odors, respectively, that this method is not applicable to neutral smell and that a further stage of treating neutral smell has to be used in addition to said two-stage operation and hence it causes a complicated multi-stage operation. Further, there may be mentioned a chelating reaction method with use of a sulfonate salt, an adsorption method by porous substances such as active carbon, an oxidative-decomposition method in the presence or absence of a catalyst, a combustion-decomposition method in which a bad smell-generating substance is decomposed to make it odorless and the like, on the basis of which numerous and manifold deodorizers are commercially available for the purpose of deodorization of bad smelling gas. Those conventional deodorization methods are, however, selectively effective only for bad odors generated from the restricted sources, and hence suffer from disadvantages that any combination of the deodorizers and deodorization devices has to be adjusted dependent upon the nature of the bad smelling gas and upon the bad smell-generating sources, that numerous deodorants and deodorization apparatus are often required to deodorize completely all kinds of bad smelling gas and that those methods are complicated and expensive ones. It has been, therefore, sought that a novel deodorizer is developed which is effective to deodorize in one-stage operation all kinds of bad smelling gas including acidic, neutral and alkaline smells generated from a wide variety of sources and which may be employed for wide ranged fields from industrial to domestic uses.
We, the present inventors, have made extensive researches in an attempt to seek for such deodorant composition as dissolving above problems, and we have now found that there may be obtained a novel deodorant composition which comprises as an active ingredient for deodorization a reaction product (present in an amount of 50% by weight or above based on the non-solvent components) obtained by reacting either polyethyleneimine or ethyleneimine-alkylene oxide copolymer having a molecular weight in the range of from 100 to 5000 with monochloroacetic acid in a weight ratio of 1:0.3 to 1.0 and that this deodorant composition may be highly effective to deodorize all kinds of bad and unpleasant odor gas including acidic, neutral and alkaline smells evolved from various sources in one-stage operation.